Oct200823

Gizmodo spoke with representatives from NVIDIA and confirmed a few interesting facts about the MacBook Pro’s NVIDIA chipsets and GPUs.

They confirmed that MacBook Pros are capable of switching from discrete to integrated GPUs on-the-fly without logging out. There already exists support for this real-time switching in Windows. So if and when Apple updates the drivers for the MacBook Pro, on-the-fly switching could be enabled. The benefit to this, of course, is when you move from word processing to playing a game, the GPU could switch from one to the other automatically without requiring a log-out.

Anothe interesting fact about the new Chpsets is the that the NVIDIA chipsets are capable of running both integrated and discrete GPUs simultaneously which would offer a large performance boost.

According to statements by NVIDIA representatives, the MacBook Pro’s hardware is capable of both

Hybrid Power – which allows your to switch from one GPU to the other for better performance vs battery life. Apple’s MacBook Pros do support this feature but presently require you to log out.

GeForce Boost – which allows both GPUs to run simultaneously to provide even better performance (and presumably, even less battery life).

The MacBook Pro may support these features but they still need specific software support to be written by Apple.

And last but not the least, previous models of MacBooks are limited to 4GB of RAM, the new MacBook Pro’s can hold up to 8GB of RAM which is a welcome change for those who use their MacBook Pros for memory intensive tasks.